HPC, Marrow

Leukemia and Other Blood Cancers

Leukemia and other blood cancers turn the white blood cells that should defend the body against disease into cancerous, mutant cells that replicate excessively without performing their disease-fighting function.

Blood cancers claim roughly 60,000 lives each year in the U.S. alone. Many of these deaths result from the shortage of matched bone marrow available for transplant. Ossium’s banked bone marrow can ameliorate the shortage by vastly increasing the supply of bone marrow donors.

Products Under Development

Chimera

Improving organ transplantation

Immune tolerance induction

Roughly 30,000 U.S. patients receive organ transplants each year. Today, these patients spend their post-transplant lives taking drugs that suppress their immune systems to mitigate damage to their new organ. Clinical trials performed at Harvard, Stanford and Northwestern have demonstrated that patients receiving organ transplants can live healthy lives without taking a single pill if they receive a bone marrow transplant from the same donor who provided the organ. By enabling this process — called immune tolerance induction — Chimera could dramatically improve the lives of tens of thousands of organ recipients each year.

Chymalis

Radiation Poisoning

Exposure to radiation from nuclear accidents or weapons damages bone marrow stem cells and can ultimately result in death. Chymalis would buy much needed time for patients recently exposed to damaging radiation.

Bone and Muscle Damage

Chymalis accelerates healing of bone and muscle tissue that’s been damaged by injuries from athletics or other physical activity by providing patients with more of the mesenchymal stem cells whose progeny repair damaged tissue.

Research Market Products

Ossium provides bone marrow (BM) cells for labs doing research in oncology, immunology, and related fields. Because we source bone marrow from deceased donors, we can offer research labs large volumes of bone marrow from the same donor for controlled experiments.

MarrowMatter

Whole processed bone marrow

HemaStem

CD34+ stem/progenitor cells

MesenStem

Low passage mesenchymal stem cells

OssioStem Medical Countermeasures

Responding to mass casualty events

Radiation poisoning treatment

Exposure to large doses of ionizing radiation (> 0.1 Gy) over a short period of time can result in radiation poisoning, a condition that causes cellular degradation from damage to DNA and other cellular structures. Nuclear attacks and accidents at nuclear reactors can cause radiation poisoning in humans. Because the hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) of the bone marrow are highly sensitive to radiation exposure, bone marrow transplants are a key treatment.

Akeso

Exploiting natural immunity

Fighting HIV/AIDS

A small, but non-negligible portion of the population has a CCR5 Delta 32 mutation that makes them immune to HIV. Europe has already begun, and the U.S. is now starting, clinical trials to replicate existing proof of concept results of curing HIV though hematopoietic stem cell transplants at scale. By making bone marrow from donors with the CCR5 Delta 32 mutation available for transplant, Ossium could cure HIV/AIDS patients.

Autoimmunity

As bone marrow transplants become safer, doctors will begin using them to treat a broader range of indications, such as chronic autoimmune diseases. Studies have shown that many chronic autoimmune diseases (e.g., type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis) are treatable by bone marrow stem cell transplant.

Icarus

Mitigating spaceflight radiation risks

Cryobanking astronaut’s healthy bone marrow

The chief risk to human health from long-term spaceflight is radiation poisoning. On Earth, our planet’s magnetic field and atmosphere insulate us from exposure to Galactic Cosmic Radiation (GCR) and Solar Particle Events (SPEs). Astronauts on long space flights endure heavy exposure to cell damaging GCR and SPEs, driving heightened risk of radiation poisoning, cancer, and skin damage. By cryobanking astronauts’ healthy bone marrow before long space flights and providing them with the option of autologous bone marrow transplants afterward, we can mitigate the health risk of long-term spaceflight.